Speeding up Lightroom
11/09/07 15:15 Filed in: Photography
Lightroom begins exhibiting its own special
quirks when you begin taxing it with a lot of photos. Martin
Evening's book on Lightroom is the go-to tome for
doing serious production work with Adobe's product, and much of
what I'm sharing here originally came from his advice on managing
the product's database.
Lightroom, like Aperture, is built on a SQLLite database and the special sauce that the software offers is its own way of interpreting RAW image files and displaying them along with your changes. Since both RAW photo processors treat the original RAW file as untouchable, changes are recorded as data instructions and applied, for your pleasure, to a preview image of the file.
Most slowdowns in both products are related to this display process, which is really the background grinding of your editing changes being applied to the preview JPEG.
You can change the size of the preview by selecting the new "Catalog Settings" menu item (under the File Menu) in version 1.1. Under "File Handling," you can set the size of previews and the length of time Lightroom will keep them around (and waste processor power building the preview images. Smaller sizes and shorter durations will increase build times for the previews when you click on a folder you haven't accessed for a while, but the payoff is faster speed when you work with only a few folders at a time in your catalogue.
Under the "General" settings, you'll find the biggest cure-all for LR sluggishness, the optimize command. I've had situations during heavy editing sessions where settings wouldn't stick and previews wouldn't change. Stop wrestling with LR and click the "Relaunch and Optimize" button. Walk away for a while. Hug your sweetie. Come back. Enjoy Lightroom again.
Lightroom, like Aperture, is built on a SQLLite database and the special sauce that the software offers is its own way of interpreting RAW image files and displaying them along with your changes. Since both RAW photo processors treat the original RAW file as untouchable, changes are recorded as data instructions and applied, for your pleasure, to a preview image of the file.
Most slowdowns in both products are related to this display process, which is really the background grinding of your editing changes being applied to the preview JPEG.
You can change the size of the preview by selecting the new "Catalog Settings" menu item (under the File Menu) in version 1.1. Under "File Handling," you can set the size of previews and the length of time Lightroom will keep them around (and waste processor power building the preview images. Smaller sizes and shorter durations will increase build times for the previews when you click on a folder you haven't accessed for a while, but the payoff is faster speed when you work with only a few folders at a time in your catalogue.
Under the "General" settings, you'll find the biggest cure-all for LR sluggishness, the optimize command. I've had situations during heavy editing sessions where settings wouldn't stick and previews wouldn't change. Stop wrestling with LR and click the "Relaunch and Optimize" button. Walk away for a while. Hug your sweetie. Come back. Enjoy Lightroom again.
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